Founding of V&V

Founding of V&V is the decisive institutional turn in which Vainqueur Knightsbane’s appetite for wealth becomes an adventurer business. Instead of burning a village over the crimes of its inhabitants, the dragon recognizes that its unattended wealth can be claimed more profitably by answering requests for payment. The company gives Vainqueur a legal and economic route into mortal society while making Victor Dalton the indispensable administrator who must translate dragon pride into paperwork, recruitment, commerce, and strategy.

From Destruction to Business

Vainqueur initially announces that he intended to burn the village to the ground for the manlings’ offenses against his royal person. His sudden change of method is not moral reform: it is a calculation about hoards. Wealth lying unused, he concludes, is being wasted unless a dragon claims it, and the Old Money perk appears to validate the idea that money can be acquired through organized service. He therefore offers to answer requests and solve the problems of inferior species in exchange for coins. The proposal preserves his predatory hierarchy—clients remain potential food and subjects remain inferior—while redirecting violence into a revenue-producing service.

The founding is also triggered by the Class System. Vainqueur gains a level in the Noble class through sheer ego and noble dragon bloodline, an achievement that confirms his self-image rather than challenging it. The system turns his vanity into measurable advancement, and the new class helps make adventuring appear to him as an extension of aristocratic entitlement: a dragon does not seek employment because he needs qualification; he declares himself overqualified. This comic mismatch between institutional requirements and Vainqueur’s self-conception drives the company’s formation.

Registration and Internal Hierarchy

Charlene doubts that a dragon can become an adventurer, but Vainqueur answers the objection with confidence rather than evidence. Faced with his implied threat to treat her as dragon food, Charlene produces a large pile of paperwork and agrees to register Vainqueur and Victor as a new adventurer company. The registration converts an improvised promise into a recognized organization and makes Charlene the bureaucratic gatekeeper through whom the dragon’s ambition enters the adventurer system.

Vainqueur immediately resolves the practical problem by promoting Victor to minion chief of staff and living signature. Victor is made responsible for managing the paperwork on Vainqueur’s behalf, a duty presented as a great honor but accompanied by no promise of payment. The hierarchy therefore has a clear division of labor: Vainqueur supplies authority, appetite, and public spectacle, while Victor absorbs the administrative burden and gives the dragon’s decisions an operational form. Victor’s new role is reinforced by the Class System, which grants him a level in the Monster Squire class for becoming the chief enforcer of a mighty dragon, together with a substantial increase to his health, strength, vitality, skills, agility, intelligence, charisma, luck, and spell points.

Charlene registers the company under the name V&V, a designation that leaves Victor stunned and suspicious that the choice is a prank. The name is deliberately spare beside Vainqueur’s grandiose titles, but it becomes the durable brand of the enterprise. Its first appearance captures the company’s basic tension: Vainqueur treats the organization as an extension of his majesty, while Victor sees the absurd administrative reality behind the heroic label.

Expansion into Commerce and Recruitment

The company quickly exceeds the narrow role of a conventional adventuring party. Vainqueur orders Victor to stop giving away the remains of defeated creatures and instead find a way to make money from what would otherwise be waste. Victor interprets the command as a plan to open a shop selling junk, monster parts, and corpses. Vainqueur then adds responsibility for preparing his class progression and training the Kobold Rangers, turning the chief of staff into a manager of logistics, education, and resource extraction.

This commercial logic later produces Nethermart, the first fiendish magic-item shop in Outremonde. Bug fiends construct a distinctive six-floor building in northern Murmurin, ivory-draped and the tallest structure beside Emperor Vainqueur’s statue. At its opening, Malfaisant advertises weapons at a thirty-percent discount in anticipation of the war with Maure and allows customers who lack coins to place their souls down as collateral. Although Nethermart is not identical with the original adventurer registration, it is a direct institutional development of V&V’s founding principle: monster power, salvage, and conflict can be reorganized into profitable services and goods.

The same expansion changes the company’s personnel base. When Vainqueur prepares for war against Furibon, Victor reports one hundred kobold applicants and additional residents with class levels above twenty, including a troll, a dryad, and a golem. Vainqueur claims not to discriminate among creatures, though he immediately defines every species as equally inferior and retains the right to regard everyone as emergency food. Recruitment thus combines an inclusive organizational policy with an openly tyrannical ideology. V&V can absorb diverse monsters because its practical need for strength is broader than Vainqueur’s prejudices, even while his language keeps the hierarchy intact.

From Company to War Machine

The adventurer company’s commercial mandate becomes inseparable from military ambition. Vainqueur repeatedly insists that Furibon is evil and must be destroyed, framing the conflict as war rather than ordinary monster hunting. The company’s members are therefore not merely contractors pursuing isolated rewards; they are applicants, trainees, and minions being assembled for a collective campaign over wealth and authority. The War of the Hoard is identified as a major historical conflict, and its final chapter bears the uncompromising declaration “Furibon must die.”

V&V’s organizational model rewards leadership as aggressively as it rewards individual combat. After fearlessly leading monsters to victory against superior opponents, Victor gains seven levels in the Monster Squire class and receives the Monster Lifeforce (Red Dragon), Monster Rider, and Monster Insight perks. The rewards formalize the transformation already visible in the company’s structure: Victor is no longer merely the dragon’s resurrected minion or signature. He becomes a trained commander whose advancement is tied to directing monster forces and whose abilities are increasingly shaped by Vainqueur’s dragon-centered system.

The Class System also imposes a ceiling on this growth. After Victor’s Killer Scythe is upgraded to Killer Scythe+ by consuming the soul of a powerful lich, he reaches the level-thirty class ceiling and can no longer gain levels without using a Crest. Experience gains fall to zero, although special deeds can still provide perks. The rule exposes the company’s dependence on institutions beyond personal will: Vainqueur can proclaim a new career, but advancement remains governed by executable systems of thresholds, rewards, and restrictions.

Legacy and Narrative Significance

Founding V&V is significant because it makes organization itself one of Vainqueur’s principal powers. The dragon’s hoard is no longer only a pile of treasure guarded by force; it becomes the center of a network that includes an adventurer company, the Kobold Rangers, salvage and corpse commerce, Nethermart, and military recruitment. Each extension converts a supposedly marginal monster activity into an institution with customers, workers, applicants, assets, and public visibility.

The founding also establishes the story’s recurring contrast between Vainqueur’s grand self-description and the practical labor performed by Victor Dalton and other subordinates. Vainqueur supplies the slogans, threats, and royal declarations, but Victor handles the consequences: forms must be signed, waste must be sold, classes must be taught, applicants must be organized, and campaigns must be prepared. The company’s absurdity is therefore functional rather than decorative. Its comedy comes from the fact that a dragon’s ego is powerful enough to create institutions, while the institutions can operate only because others continually make his impossible declarations administratively real.

That pattern persists after the company’s founding. V&V’s enterprises help establish a monster-centered economy and military order, but they also carry Vainqueur’s possessive logic into every new domain. Wealth becomes service, service becomes recruitment, recruitment becomes war, and war becomes another means of enlarging the hoard. The company’s decisive achievement is consequently not simply giving Vainqueur an adventurer career; it is providing the organizational form through which his personal greed can expand into a society-shaping system.